Months before the cryptocurrency market crisis that followed the liquidity crunch at the crypto trading platform FTX, its now-former CEO had unintentionally described crypto staking or yield farming as essentially a Ponzi scheme.
As it happens, Coffeezilla, a YouTuber who investigates online scams, published a video on April 27, 2022, in which he drew attention to Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) controversial remarks during his interview with Bloomberg financial columnist Matt Levine and the Odd Lots podcast.
‘A box’ that does nothing
During the interview, SBF tried to describe what yield farming is but ended up accidentally describing a Ponzi scheme that starts “with a company that builds a box.” As he explained:
“They probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now, actually, ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It’s just a box.”
As he continued, Bankman-Fried highlighted that “then this protocol issues a token, we’ll call it an ‘X’ token, and ‘X’ token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by governance vote of holders of the ‘X’ tokens.”
Creating the hype
Going forward, the former FTX CEO said that “in five minutes, with an internet connection, you could create such a box and such a token, and that should be worth like $180 or something market cap for the…
